With the advent of computer network technologies, electronic documents, files, messages, or data have been transmitted among various networked computing systems of a plurality of different platforms (e.g., different operating systems, different browsers, different computer capabilities, etc.) for various purposes such as sharing or collaboration. Such electronic documents, files, messages, or data may include non-sensitive data. Oftentimes, such non-sensitive data may also include sensitive data that the owners or users may wish to prevent undesired or unauthorized access.
The increasing popularity of hosted software applications may require the transmission of sensitive data across various networks and thus exacerbates the risk of inadvertent, undesired, or unauthorized disclosure of such sensitive data.
Conventionally, users or owners may wish to encrypt such electronic documents, files, messages, or data. Nonetheless, an encrypted document by encoding the information (e.g., plaintext) in an electronic document into ciphertext by using an encrypting algorithm so that the information can only be revealed when the ciphertext is decrypted. Nonetheless, encryption alone generates an encrypted file that attracts attention and may thus be subject to various types of attacks in an attempt to illegally gain access to the information.
Therefore, there exists a need for a method, system, and computer product for protecting data in an electronic document, file, message, or data segment using steganography techniques to address at least the aforementioned challenges arising out of the generating and protection of electronic documents.